Below we present a new foreword by Emilio Albamonte and Matías Maiello to announce the forthcoming publication of the English-language edition of the book Socialist Strategy and Military Art. The authors revisit some of today’s central debates on strategy in dialogue with the recent issue of the British Marxist journal Historical Materialism dedicated to the topic.
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Socialist Strategy and Military Art was first published in Spanish in 2017, marking the centennial of the Russian Revolution. Since then, it has been published in French and Portuguese. Writing this foreword was prompted by the publication of the English-language edition, but it is also an opportunity to revisit debates from nearly a decade ago and to explore their relevance today. It may seem like a short time, but these were no ordinary years; they have profoundly altered the global landscape.
Furthermore, the British Marxist journal Historical Materialism has published a special issue, edited by Josep Maria Antentas and Panagiotis Sotiris, dedicated to the Marxist debate on strategy, offering us the chance to provide a counterpoint here on several of the debate’s central elements.1Josep Maria Antentas and Panagiotis Sotiris, eds., “Special Issue on Strategy,” Historical Materialism 33, no. 4 (2025). In his article “On Strategy: Thinking with the Military,” Antentas points out the contemporary disconnect between strategic discussion “from below” and military thought. Among the exceptions to this, he mentions Socialist Strategy and Military Art. He asserts, however, that we “address the interrelationship between revolutionary strategy and Clausewitz, not to explore new strategic proposals but to reinforce the paradigm of October 1917.”2Josep Maria Antentas, “On Strategy: Thinking with the Military,” Historical Materialism 33, no. 4 (2025): 130. We take this objection as a starting point because it forces us to bring to the table a set of current problems and, in turn, the place of theory and the history of past battles in strategic thought.
Let us begin by stating that the thesis attributed to us is very different from the one we actually hold. Socialist Strategy and Military Art does not present October 1917 as an ahistorical paradigm to be repeated. Leon Trotsky himself issued a warning on this matter that is worth reiterating. Addressing those who sought to transfer the example of October to other contexts, he said:
There cannot be the slightest talk of sanctifying into any sort of a law this peculiar combination of a “dry” and almost imperceptible insurrection together with the defense of soviet legality against Kornilov and his followers. On the contrary, we can state with certainty that this experience will never be repeated anywhere in such a form. But a careful study of it is most necessary.
The virtually unrepeatable nature of the conditions that existed in Russia in 1917 stemmed from the combination of a bourgeois regime that had not yet fully taken shape, the widespread arming of the masses, and the previous development of the soviets themselves in the Russian experience of 1905. As a leader of the Red Army, Trotsky pointed out that civil war in the West would necessarily have more elements of a war of position, in contrast to Russia, where it was a war of maneuver, owing to its backwardness and vast territory. He was not the only one to have noted these conditions; rather, this observation would become one of the focal points of debate in the early years of the Third International, later elaborated on in the Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci. In our case, we critically appropriate the works of Carl von Clausewitz, Hans Delbrück, and other theorists of the art of war from that very same perspective. We seek to examine the specific crossroads of revolutions in the “West” and to investigate the particularities of these problems in the 21st century in order to conceptualize new phenomena and scenarios for a revolutionary strategy. But this also requires building on the experience of the 20th century, which did not pass in vain. Here, we believe, lies the true starting point of the discussion.
What is the purpose of a theory of strategy? Toward the end of his life, Clausewitz posed a similar question regarding the theory of war. Wars throughout history have differed enormously from one another, ranging from simple armed skirmishes to “absolute war,” in which historical conditions change, sometimes radically. What, then, is the purpose of a theory of war that attempts to encompass such diverse phenomena? The Prussian general knew that theory could not accompany the general onto the battlefield, since there is no manual for winning a war, as some theorists of his time claimed. But at the same time, he responded to those who argued that there can be no theory of war because passions and chance come into play, contending that it is possible to draw valuable generalizations from past experience to avoid starting anew every time.
If war is a true “chameleon,” as Clausewitz pointed out, there are, nevertheless, a series of constant elements — with their various interrelationships — that can be found in every war. He called these the “remarkable trinity” (wunderliche Dreifaltigkeit).3Thomas Waldman, War, Clausewitz and the Trinity (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013). The Prussian general distinguished, beneath the varied concrete manifestations of war, three recurring constituent elements: “hatred and enmity” as a blind impulse of nature; “the play of chance and probability,” which necessitates strategic calculation; and politics, of which war is an instrument. Each of these three elements was, for him, “more characteristic” of three entities, respectively: the people, the army and the generals, and the government.4Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). He also added a methodological caveat that is central to our discussion:
A theory that ignores any one of [those three tendencies] or seeks to fix an arbitrary relationship between them would conflict with reality to such an extent that for this reason alone it would be totally useless. Our task therefore is to develop a theory that maintains a balance between these three tendencies, like an object suspended between three magnets.
In Socialist Strategy and Military Art, we draw — despite all their differences — a parallel between that trinity and the relationship in Marxism among the working class, the revolutionary party, and its leadership.5Leon Trotsky, “The Class, the Party and the Leadership: Why Was the Spanish Proletariat Defeated?,” 1940. The differences are enormous, and we elaborate on them there. The first is that neither the party nor a revolutionary leadership is a given, as a government in an interstate war might be. Both must be forged, carving out a path for themselves in the course of the class struggle and amid the frictions between different tendencies within the class itself. In turn, as soon as a leadership emerges, it inevitably rises above the class and risks coming under pressure from other classes. On the other hand, the working class — unlike the “people” in the classical Clausewitzian formulation — has historically demonstrated a capacity incomparably superior to spontaneous “blind natural force.” The creation of the soviets — that is, the discovery of a new political form alternative to bourgeois politics — is perhaps the best demonstration of this, as is the recurring tendency, evident in every acute phase of the class struggle, toward the development of its own institutions of self-organization. Even so, replacing the term “people” with “class” — far from eliminating the question of the relationship with the nonproletarian masses — provides the basis for addressing the central problem of hegemony and its close link to the development of bodies of self-organization such as the soviets or councils.
That said, the conceptual articulation of both “trinities” is the same on one central point: that theory contributes to strategy insofar as it manages to remain suspended between its three poles of attraction — in our case, the class’s self-activity, the calculation of probabilities, and revolutionary politics — without dissolving any one of them into the others. In this “trinity” — as we understand it, that is, historically — there is no form of mechanical discipline between the leadership and the class. Every revolutionary party, to be such, must earn the right to leadership through action alongside the vanguard and through shared experience with the class.
We could highlight two major negations of this threefold relationship in recent times. The first is the apparatchik approach, which Sotiris describes in Historical Materialism as an “electoral machine” — and, we might add, a syndicalist or trade-unionist one — and the “autonomization of the leadership from the mass of the party,” a “plebiscitary-representative” relationship that seeks passive and uncritical support, an “extractive or vampire-like modern prince,” in Antentas’s terms, or a “ritualistic and mechanistic conception of political discipline.” The second is the autonomist approach, which has multiple variants, and which Sotiris rightly characterizes as a “substitution of strategy by ontology” — communism as a normative dynamic derived from social antagonism, without any analysis of strategy or tactics — or as an “anti-strategic” strategy that outright rejects class alliance, tactical retreat, the united front, and the seizure of power, among other similar deviations.
The relationship between those “three poles of attraction” is, in our view, one of the major strategic debates of our time. The starting point is the recognition that without mass self-organization, a party, or a leadership, no revolutionary strategy is possible. But above all, it is a question of the relationships among them. What is the relationship between the soviets and the party, given that without soviets, the party is either powerless or replaces the masses? Where do the soviets or councils — understood not as institutions that can be decreed but as mass united-front organizations — come from? They often arise from modest organizations of struggle, yet they never fully unleash their potential without revolutionaries who consciously fight to develop them against their enemies. In these pages, we address some aspects of these questions by way of an introduction.
Demystifying the Notion of “Soviets” and the Problem of the United Front
Since 2011, there have unfolded open processes of class struggle in dozens of countries around the world. Most of them — especially those that were part of the cycle that began with the Arab Spring and, later, the cycle that began with the Yellow Vests in late 2018 — have shared a fundamental characteristic: the primacy of the dynamics of revolt. There were enormous outpourings of social energy, leading even to the fall of governments, but all taking place within the framework of the continued existence of the very same regimes rejected by the masses, with, at most, a change in political personnel. With a few partial exceptions, these movements largely assumed fragmented, “citizen-led” forms, without developing new institutions of self-organization capable of unifying the mass movement. The vast energy they unleashed was ultimately dissipated or channeled within the framework of the capitalist state, reestablishing a circular relationship between mobilization and institutionalization that allows bourgeois regimes in crisis to reproduce themselves.
In this context, we examine Sotiris’s strategic proposal for an “integral united front.” The latter’s construction is based on an analogy: just as Gramsci defined the integral state as the “entire complex of practical and theoretical activities” that ensures the bourgeoisie’s hegemony, the Modern Prince must be understood as the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities that emerge from the subaltern classes in their struggle for integral autonomy and hegemony. Hence, “today the Modern Prince can only take the form of an integral united front.” It is a front, not a party, because “any adequate political formation can only be the outcome of a convergence of different organizations, ideological currents, and political groups.” And it is comprehensive because it is not limited to an electoral front or a tactical alliance, but rather is “a front that can produce politics, mass line, strategy, hegemonic discourses.” Just as the comprehensive state represents the unity of political society and civil society, the integral united front would represent “the contradictory and tendential unity of political organizations and movements” against exploitation, oppression, and all their forms. Building the party, understood in this way, is not a recruitment campaign but a “permanent constituent process,” which must be combined “with the autonomy of forms of self-organization and counter-power of the subaltern.”6Panagiotis Sotiris, “Revolutionary Strategy Revisited: Strategic Hypotheses and Open Questions,” Historical Materialism 33, no. 4 (2025): 55.
Yet many of the characteristics that Sotiris attributes to the integral united front were already those of an institution that no one devised and that, in many cases, successfully embodied them. We refer to the “soviets” or councils. And not as a uniquely Russian phenomenon: whenever the constituent power of the working class and the mass movement bursts onto the scene, it tends to take on its own institutional form. Bodies of this kind developed not only in Russia in 1905 and 1917, but also in Germany with the Räte of 1918; in Italy with the factory councils of 1919–20; during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 with the workers’ and peasants’ councils; in the Portuguese Revolution of 1974 with the workers’, residents’, and soldiers’ committees; in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 with the shoras; and in Chile with the cordones industriales of 1972–73, among others. None were the product of a previous design or preestablished model; rather, they emerged in response to the needs of the struggle, in countries with very different political and cultural traditions.
In their most developed form, the councils tended to be structured around elected and recallable delegates within the fabric of society’s production and reproduction — factories, businesses, farms, schools, universities, and neighborhoods. This enabled them to articulate a wide range of demands and forms of struggle within an alternative power structure. One of their great strengths — which makes them irreplaceable for a revolutionary strategy — is their flexible and adaptable structure, allowing them to immediately express changes, both social and political, that occur in the relative position of the classes.7Leon Trotsky, “Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky,” 1920. That is why they can express the constituent power of the majorities at the moment it erupts — something that legal and parliamentary mechanisms cannot do. This cannot be replaced by any coalition of organizations, electoral front, or left-wing government.
The soviets are not a mythical entity, as they are often portrayed. Rather, they are first and foremost mass united-front organizations. They are the product of the unification of the working class and its allies in the struggle against capital and its state. As such, they bring together all mobilized groups, they are not bound by any preestablished program, and they are constantly renewed by the movement. In cases where they gain greater vitality, all political tendencies among the working people have the opportunity to compete for their leadership on the basis of the broadest democracy. For much of the 20th century, these types of soviet organizations faced opposition from the main currents of the labor movement — from social democracy to Stalinism — as well as from militarist strategies that replaced them with parties organized in the form of a people’s army.
By reestablishing a “demystified” conception of the soviet as a mass united-front body, we can chart a strategic path in the struggle to establish such organizations. First, there is no way to establish them without practically resolving the problem of the united front. That is why we devote two chapters of this book to discussing it — from its origins in the initiative of the Communist workers of Stuttgart and its widespread adoption by the Third International to the subsequent developments by Gramsci and Trotsky. This is a strategic battle waged through the tactic of unifying the ranks of the working class across the social, political, and organizational divisions imposed by the bureaucracy, in order to confront the class enemy and, at the same time, wage an open struggle for a revolutionary program and strategy within that unity. The aim is to build a shared experience with workers who still place their trust in conciliatory leadership, or to “march separately, strike together,” according to the formula of the Third International.
A Historical Example: The Greek Case, 2010–15
One of the recent cases in which the problem of the united front arose particularly acutely was the profound class struggle in Greece that began in 2010 and saw Syriza come to power in 2015. This is the backdrop for many of the reflections Sotiris presents in his article in Historical Materialism and also in the original foreword to the Spanish edition of this book, which is included in the present volume.
Sotiris argues that Syriza “lacked both the necessary strategic horizon and a thorough thinking of questions of political power and governmental practice, while at the same time underestimating the ability of the institutional framework — and social violence — of the Eurozone to block any such path.”8Sotiris, “Revolutionary Strategy Revisited,” 34… It is legitimate to ask, as he does, what would have happened if Syriza had respected that result, in which the no vote against the Troika exceeded 60 percent of the total. At the time, we started from the same question and saw in it a great missed opportunity, in which the tactic of a workers’ government could have played a fundamental role.9See the prologue of the Spanish-language edition of this book, and chapter 4 of the present edition.
But to understand the process as a whole, we are particularly interested in the entire class struggle that preceded Syriza’s rise to power. The united front was conspicuously absent from the period spanning 2010 to 2012, which was marked by dozens of general strikes, mass mobilizations, and clashes with the police. The union leaderships were its main enemies — both the majority sectors of the bureaucracy, with their policy of subordination to the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) and other pro-business parties, and, at the other extreme, the labor federation led by the Greek Communist Party (KKE), which, through a combination of sectarianism and opportunism, explicitly refused to unite in action. Despite more than 30 general strikes, each of these leaderships, in its own way, obstructed the united front necessary to defeat the austerity plans. To the left of Syriza, Antarsya — a heterogeneous front that brought together Althusserian-inspired organizations and groups that had split from the KKE, as well as Maoists, Trotskyists, and radical environmentalists — lacked the material strength and influence, at decisive moments, to present an alternative.
Syriza’s electoral rise from 2012 to 2015 is, from one perspective, the political counterpart to the progressive impotence reached by the struggle, which was divided and worn down by union and political bureaucracies into many discontinuous and scattered actions. Stathis Kouvelakis pointed this out at the time: “The 32 days of general strikes, the hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets, have not stopped a single measure of the austerity ‘memoranda.’” Yet Kouvelakis did not sufficiently address this issue, noting immediately afterward that “Syriza seized the imagination of the people by providing a political translation that so far had been missing.”10Stathis Kouvelakis, “Syriza and Socialist Strategy—Part One,” Socialist Worker, March 10, 2015.
Sotiris argues that, although Syriza failed in 2015, the hypothesis of a “left-wing government” should not be abandoned, since in Europe it’s very difficult to imagine a sequence different from that of a “severe political crisis” to an “electoral mutiny” by the subaltern classes and from there to a left-wing government emerging from the elections.11Sotiris, “Revolutionary Strategy Revisited,” 34. Yet to imagine a different sequence — or even to imagine that same sequence but one in which there were organizations capable of capitalizing on Syriza’s capitulation — it is necessary to start with the strategy of attrition to which the entire movement was subjected before Syriza’s electoral rise. That is to say, we must problematize the absence not of ideal models of a united front, but of mass unity for the class struggle. This was absent throughout the 2010–12 process as a result of the actions of the bureaucracies, without there being a force of similar magnitude — but acting in the opposite direction — capable of imposing it. This is a conclusion that goes far beyond the Greek case; it is a problem that has plagued most of the political processes of recent times.
To address this issue, it is not enough to reflect on political power in general; what is needed is a perspective grounded in the constituent power of the working class and a strategy based on what military historian Lawrence Freedman defines as the “art of creating power.”12Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), xii. From this perspective, one of the central questions raised by the Greek process — among others that have unfolded over the past decade and a half — was this: How can a united front be established under existing conditions, with a fragmented working class, union and social bureaucracies conspiring against it, and relatively weak revolutionary organizations?
“Action Committees” as a Means of Breaking the Strategic Deadlock
One of the major shortcomings of Socialist Strategy and Military Art is that it lacks an answer with any real operational value to that question. It was not until several years after the publication of its first edition, and in part thanks to our participation in the political laboratory of the international class struggle as part of the current Permanent Revolution Current — Fourth International (CRP-CI), that we rediscovered a key element in what we might define as a theory regarding how the working class is constituted as a subject in a scenario “saturated” with bureaucratic apparatuses, a characteristic of Western sociopolitical structures.13Emilio Albamonte and Matías Maiello, “Trotsky, Gramsci, and the Emergence of the Working Class as Hegemonic Subject,” Left Voice, March 13, 2021. We are referring to the notion of “action committees,” which Trotsky developed in his writings on France in the mid-1930s.
The starting point is the same problem that Gramsci addressed with the notion of the state in its “integral significance.” If the “expansion” of the state was the bourgeoisie’s response to the emergence of the labor movement in the early 20th century, and among its fundamental mechanisms is the co-optation of mass organizations (unions, social and democratic movements, and others) and the expansion of bureaucracies within them, with their dual function of integrating the masses into the state and fragmenting the mass movement, then the problem of constituting the working class as a subject is not resolved simply by declaring the need to form a united front.
The question that Trotsky places at the center — in the face of the relative strength of the union bureaucracy and the reformist apparatuses (in France at that time, the PCF and the SFIO) and the weakness of the revolutionaries — is how to break the resistance of the bureaucratic apparatuses in order to unleash the power of the working class as a hegemonic subject. His answer lies in the articulation of the vanguard, the advanced and militant sectors, through the creation of institutions for unification and coordination in the face of strikes, demonstrations, street skirmishes, or direct uprisings. These are inevitable in any situation that is intensifying from the standpoint of the class struggle. The task of revolutionaries consists of “unifying them and giving them greater strength,” without letting a single opportunity pass to organize those who take to the streets to fight.
Trotsky defines these action committees as follows: “In question here is not the formal democratic representation of all and any masses but the revolutionary representation of the struggling masses. The Committee of Action is an apparatus of struggle.”14Leon Trotsky, “Whither France?,” 1936. He adds that these committees are not convened by statute, nor for a day and time set in advance; workers can elect them only when they themselves participate in an action and recognize the need for leadership. They do not replace the parties; rather, in relation to them, “they can be considered revolutionary parliaments,” in which the parties’ participation is not just allowed but necessary, yet they are “controlled in action” within the committees themselves. Their strength lies in their having arisen from the needs of each process and not from an ideal design.
Nor are they soviets, and Trotsky took care to clarify this. Their task at that time was “to unify the defensive struggle of the working masses in France and also to instill in those masses an awareness of their own strength for the future offensive.”15Trotsky, “Whither France?” Under certain conditions, he added, the action committees “can transform themselves into soviets,” but that would depend as much on the action of the vanguard as on the evolution of objective conditions. To counter all mystification, he also recalled that the Russian soviets themselves, in their early stages, “were not at all what they subsequently became and in those days they were often called by the modest name of workers’ or strike committees.”16Trotsky, “Whither France?” We could consider “action committees,” in that precise sense, as the link between the dispersion of conflicts and the united front, and between the united front and the struggle for soviet-type organizations.
These organizations are, moreover, the answer to the imbalance between the available revolutionary forces and the tasks posed by processes of radicalization. In the French situation at that time, Trotsky considered that there was no time to create a party powerful enough to surpass all other organizations before the decisive conflicts, but it was entirely possible in the short term “to win over the broad masses — not for our program, not for the Fourth International, but for these action committees,” which, once created, would become “a magnificent springboard for a revolutionary party.”17Letter from Trotsky to Jean Rous, November 13, 1935. This is an operational approach that embraces the struggle for the united front when party leaderships block it — which is the rule rather than the exception.
This entire framework represents a very different dynamic from that suggested by the idea of a comprehensive united front proposed by Sotiris to address a set of strategic problems. On the one hand, the idea of action committees offers an alternative to the expansion of an apparatus as a means of conceiving the development of a revolutionary party, where the central focus is on merging with the most advanced sectors of the vanguard. And not just in any way but by jointly participating in action and in shaping the movement’s orientation through debate among the various political tendencies operating to the left of the bureaucracy. On the other hand, it avoids being confused with the strategy of the so-called “broad anti-capitalist parties,”18Claudia Cinatti, “¿Qué partido para qué estrategia?,” Estrategia Internacional, no. 24 (December 2007–January 2008). which are divided into permanent internal tendencies where — far from broad and democratic debate — each tendency sets its own orientation without consideration for the rest. This is a structure in which joint activity is reduced to a minimum — generally limited to election campaigns and conventions where each tendency rallies support for its platform — while public figures, whether in parliament or the labor movement, define the policy of the entire organization through their actions. The key point is that, when it comes time to make decisions, these organizations are incapable of doing so. This is not contradictory to parliamentarism or unionism within the framework of the regime, but it is contradictory to the class struggle, and the more acute the struggle, the more so. This was the case in France with the NPA (New Anti-capitalist Party), the majority of whose leadership ended up joining Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s New Popular Front alongside the Socialist Party. It was also the case with the Antarsya coalition in Greece, which split at the very moment Syriza was capitulating; one faction joined the failed Popular Unity project, which effectively proposed a sort of return to the original Syriza.
Faced with this whole set of problems, the action committee has the virtue, to paraphrase Clausewitz, of remaining suspended between the different poles of attraction. It is neither a party nor is it yet a soviet. Nor is it a united front in the strict sense, as formulated by the Third International. In other words, it does not replace the struggle to unify the working class’s mass organizations in order to “strike together” against the capitalists; rather, it presents itself as a platform that brings together forces — primarily those in the vanguard or engaged in struggle but currently scattered — to break the resistance of the bureaucratic apparatuses to the united front. On the other hand, it raises the possibility that revolutionaries can openly contend with other tendencies active within the vanguard to propose a direction for the movement. In short, it maintains a relationship between these three poles of the trinity without merging them: the activity of the masses who take to the streets to fight and find an organization in it; the strategic calculation regarding the articulation of forces to fight for the united front; and revolutionary politics, which involves an open struggle for leadership within the organization, “controlled in action” by the vanguard itself.
The “Integral State”: Unions and Movements as Battlegrounds
The issue underlying this entire series of strategic struggles stems from a specific conceptual approach to the question of the state, which the reader will find elaborated on throughout the various chapters of this book. But it is worth reiterating some points here as part of our counterargument.
Sotiris develops the concept of the materiality of the state by drawing on the work of Nicos Poulantzas, explaining that the state is a “material condensation, that is, a materialised, solidified and institutionalised relation of forces manifest in the class character of its apparatuses, practices, discourses, and knowledges it produces and codifies.”19Sotiris, “Revolutionary Strategy Revisited,” 49. He also highlights its “relational” nature — which he distinguishes from its malleable nature — and from this draws a conclusion that seeks to avoid gradualism, noting that “any strategy of ‘left governance’ can only be thought of today as an institutionally violent strategy, a strategy of ruptures with the existing institutional framework.”20Sotiris, “Revolutionary Strategy Revisited,” 38. He adds that, since the state “represents an excess of force on the part of the ruling social bloc,” there must be “a reverse excess of force from the part of the subaltern classes,” consisting of mobilization, politicization, programmatic preparation, self-organization, and self-defense.21Sotiris, “Revolutionary Strategy Revisited,” 49. Now, if the capitalist state, and not the government or even the regime, were the crystallization of the balance of forces, then a revolution — in the sense of destroying the bourgeois state apparatus and replacing it with another power — would not be necessary for the working class to come to power, provided it achieves a sufficiently favorable balance of forces. At most, one could argue, as Poulantzas does, for the need for “a process of effective ruptures” within the “strategic terrain of the state” itself,22Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: Verso, 2014.), p. 258. but nothing more than that. It is no coincidence that Poulantzas himself explicitly rules out the “smashing or destruction” of the state apparatus.23Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, 261*.* Hence, in the conception of the state — in its broad sense — as the “arena of a strategic field,” the need for the proletariat’s transition to the strategic offensive tends to disappear, and with it, logically, insurrection as well. The accumulation of forces is conceived as taking place within the framework of the state itself rather than as being forged for combat.
In response to this approach, in Socialist Strategy and Military Art, we formulated an alternative thesis that we would like to restate here. It is not the state that has become a battlefield but rather, since the late 19th century and, above all, the early 20th century, the labor movement:
Faced with the challenge of the workers’ organization that “occupies” a larger political-social territory, the bourgeoisie, through its state, has gone out to fight “outside,” beyond the “public” theater of operations, to wage war within the very organizations of the proletariat (and other “movements”), relying on the bureaucracy as its vanguard in this struggle. In other words, it is the organizations of the labor movement that have become battlefields.24See chapter 9.
This does not imply that the bureaucracies of mass organizations are directly composed of state officials, although this can certainly happen. Gramsci argued that what matters is an organic identification between the members of a group and the state: if their spontaneous activity ends up coinciding with the aims of the state, that is enough.25Antonio Gramsci, “Encyclopaedic Notions and Cultural Topics: Individual Initiative,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 317. This opens up a whole spectrum of bureaucracies — more or less venal, more or less “spontaneous” — each of which, in its own way, acts as an outpost of the state within the organizations of the mass movement. Drawing on Gramsci, Fabio Frosini stresses that what is at stake is not a sociological feature of how society happens to be organized but the consolidation of a political strategy, what Gramsci calls passive revolution, that moves into political space that liberalism has left undefended.26Fabio Frosini, La religione dell’uomo moderno: Politica e verità nei Quaderni del carcere di Antonio Gramsci (Rome: Carocci, 2010), 307.
In the organizations of the subaltern classes, the identity-distinction between civil society and political society, which Gramsci discusses, is expressed in the fact that, insofar as they are led by the bureaucracy, those organizations serve above all the ends of the state. But insofar as they represent “elements of workers’ democracy” won by the proletariat within bourgeois society, they can be reclaimed for revolutionary purposes. The trade unions of our time can serve as tools of imperialist capitalism — or of subordination to it in oppressed countries — to discipline workers and prevent revolution, or they can become tools of the revolutionary movement. Trotsky concluded from this that “the neutrality of the trade unions is completely and irretrievably a thing of the past.”27Leon Trotsky, “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay,” 1940. What the “expansion” of the state suppresses is not the possibility of reclaiming them but the possibility of their remaining neutral.
In approaches such as the one developed by Sotiris, the excess of state force is counterbalanced by a reverse excess constituted outside the state. For us, this reverse excess cannot be constituted without defeating the mediation that operates within the organizations of the mass movement. It should be clarified that this concerns not only the unions but also social, democratic, and various other types of movements that are subject to a similar process. The bureaucracy of unions or social movements, as a form of mediation, does not appear as an operative category in the conceptual framework proposed by Sotiris. Bureaucracy seems to be associated only with one of its possible manifestations, namely party bureaucracy. While he addresses the lack of organic links among political forces such as Syriza, there is a gap regarding the strategic struggle over the orientation of mass movement organizations. This omission, it should be noted, is by no means an exclusive shortcoming of our author.
In Socialist Strategy and Military Art, we address this problem in a debate with Peter Thomas and his interpretation of the idea of “hegemonic class apparatuses,” which he formulates by drawing on elements from Gramsci’s work. By this concept, he refers to the broad range of class institutions — understood in a broad sense, ranging from newspapers to all kinds of organizations and political parties themselves — through which “a class and its allies engage their opponents in a struggle for political power.”28Peter Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 226. For Thomas, the development of this concept is intended to deprive the bourgeoisie of its social base and, in this way, to “neutralize” the capitalist state apparatus. In our view, there is a significant degree of one-sidedness in this approach, insofar as it is the capitalist state, through the bureaucracy, that neutralizes workers’ organizations to bring them under its control. Thus, those “hegemonic apparatuses” are not in and of themselves a “material condensation of the balance of forces”; rather, they have a relative value, even when on the defensive. Depending on whether they are in the hands of the workers’ movement itself or of the bureaucracy, they can be means used by the proletariat to confront the bourgeoisie or, conversely, means used by the bourgeoisie and its state to control the workers’ movement.
At stake here is a fundamental struggle in which the fight against the bureaucracy is not a problem reserved for the day after the seizure of power, nor an issue exclusive to the moment of the offensive, but rather a constant, day-to-day struggle, inseparable from the very constitution of the working class as a hegemonic subject. It is on this terrain — that of the strategic struggle over the orientation of the unions and movements, through the tactic of the united front and the development of revolutionary currents within those organizations — that the “reverse excess of force” identified by Sotiris can be forged. Otherwise, the accumulation of forces continues to be conceived within the confines established by the “integral state.” From this perspective, the lack of organic links that Sotiris rightly points out in Syriza, Podemos, and similar political formations is the necessary flip side of their adaptation to the expanded state. This neoreformism, we might say, is the political form that best accommodates the limits of the current sociopolitical structure of domination, and for that reason, it remains almost exclusively within the realm of “political society,” while the “expanded” action of the state — with the bureaucracy as its vanguard — unfolds in the realm of “civil society.”
The Party as a Strategic Multiplier
If the organizations of the mass movement are the arena where the balance of power is largely decided, the next question is: What force can wage the struggle there? Here, the first difference we pointed out regarding the Clausewitzian trinity comes into full play. In a war between two states, the government is a given, whereas a revolutionary party and leadership must be forged amid class struggle and the frictions among tendencies operating within the class itself, without emerging merely as a reflection of it or as a product of spontaneous struggle.
Sotiris is correct when he points out that “the idea of ‘building the party’ through the expansion of a single tendency cannot pass any test of political exigency,”29Panagiotis, “Revolutionary Strategy Revisited,” 55. and that recruitment conceived as “induction to a sect” produces nothing but apparatuses. Yet the conclusion he draws from this observation shifts the problem rather than resolving it. If the Modern Prince can today take the form only of a comprehensive united front — the convergence of already-existing organizations, ideological currents, and political groups — the question of origin is resolved by a mere sum of preexisting organizations. This leaves unanswered the question of which political force — with what kind of cohesion, and with what program and strategy — is best suited for the struggle to establish the working class as a hegemonic subject.
In Socialist Strategy and Military Art, we address this debate in contrast to the theses put forward by Lars Lih in his book Lenin Rediscovered: “What Is to Be Done?” in Context.30Lars Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: “What Is to Be Done?” in Context (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008). His thesis — that of Lenin’s “aggressive unoriginality” compared to Karl Kautsky’s politics — argues that Lenin does not develop any conception of a “new type of party,” but rather adapts the model of German social democracy to different national conditions. Hence, according to him, the terms “party of a new type” and “vanguard party” are useful “only if they are applied to the SPD [Social Democratic Party of Germany] as well as the Bolsheviks.” To substantiate this thesis, he traces continuities in the formulations of one that reappear in the other and, based on certain common formulations, deduces that their conception of the party is the same. This is where the argument falls short. Both Kautsky and Lenin, in fact, shared the formula of “merging socialism and the workers’ movement” as a strategic objective — a point Lih rightly notes — but the conception of the party is defined precisely by the paths it charts to achieve this objective; it is here that the two diverge to the point of becoming antagonistic. At this point, the response to the emergence of a labor bureaucracy within the mass organizations themselves — as a central new phenomenon of the 20th century — becomes decisive.
Lenin’s innovation is not to be found primarily in an organizational scheme but in the place he assigned to this struggle. With the development of the bureaucracy, any a priori strategic identification between party and class became arbitrary; it was — as Clausewitz would say — instantly placed in opposition to reality. Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, from nearly opposite perspectives, maintained a blurred distinction between class, party, and leadership. The question is: How can we prevent the working class from becoming a “maneuverable mass” for a trade union and electoral apparatus (per Kautsky) without falling into the trap of passively awaiting — however actively — the rise of a class struggle capable of altering the entire equation (per Luxemburg)? The application of Lenin’s response to the “West” is first a practical matter before a theoretical one. It consisted of creating a material force that would operate in the opposite direction to that of the bureaucracy.
There are three central features that allow Lenin’s conception to be generalized beyond the specific Russian context. First, his objective is not to secure formal allegiance from the leaderships of mass organizations to the party but rather to develop revolutionary currents within them. These currents are organized in concentric circles with increasingly broader workers’ organizations until they encompass the unorganized sectors that follow the party “at least in the great manifestations of the class struggle.”31V. I. Lenin, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back,” 1915. In other words, it is a party defined by its relationship with mass organizations that it does not control and within which it must struggle.
Second, there is a certain continuity between its struggle against Russian liquidationism — the refusal to fight under the conditions imposed by the tsarist police — and, in “Western” bourgeois-democratic regimes, the struggle against the labor bureaucracy, insofar as it fulfills, to borrow Gramsci’s formulation, the functions of “organs of political order, of an investigational and preventive character” within the organizations of the mass movement in order “to safeguard the political and economic domination of the ruling classes.”32Gramsci, “Caesarism,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 221.
Third, there is the centrality Lenin assigns to combat. Contrary to an approach that reserves organization and education for “peacetime” and physical struggle for revolutionaries, Lenin conceives of partial confrontations as “schools of war,” and political education as the training of “tribunes of the people” — taken together, they can generalize every instance of oppression into “a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation.”33Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (1901–2). The separation between peacetime and acute instances of struggle survives today in less theorized forms, such as the division between the labor movement and politics, or between struggle during nonelection years and politics during election years.
At this point, the problem of the party becomes intertwined with that of self-organization. What distinguishes a revolutionary party from a left-wing apparatus in general is that its construction is closely linked to Marx’s maxim that the emancipation of the workers will be the work of the workers themselves. Its task is not to “represent” the class but to fight for it to organize itself and become a hegemonic subject. Hence, we prefer to conceive of the party as a “strategic multiplier.” The term comes from military theory. Its origin lies in the concept of a “force multiplier,” which refers to any factor that significantly increases the effectiveness of a military unit, to the point of enabling it to achieve greater results than those that might be expected.34Cf. Freedman, Strategy. That multiplier is strategic — and not merely tactical or operational — when it helps transform temporary military success into a political and military position that is sustainable over time.35Cf. Matthew N. Metzel et al., “Winning before the War: A Case for Consolidation of Gains,” Military Review, November–December 2023. Both the revolutionary party and bodies of self-organization can be approached strategically from this perspective: the party brings together advanced sectors around a revolutionary program and strategy and enables them to exert a decisive influence on processes involving millions; bodies of self-organization expand the struggle and unify it when confronted with the state. For this reason, both are situated on the same theoretical level as mechanisms through which the dispersed strength of the class is democratically centralized and expanded at the same time.
Now, of the three “poles of attraction,” the third — leadership — is, like the party, not a given. To situate this concept, it is helpful to start with the formula of the need to “merge socialism and the workers’ movement” that we mentioned earlier, which synthesizes one of the cent